A few days ago, I was reading Matthew 3 in NRSVue and came upon the "winnowing fork." I've heard enough sermons to think of this as a pitch fork, but there is certainly some reason to use the arcane version here. This led me down a path to the British Museum, where they have a lovely example of a winnowing fork in their collection:
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_As1992-08-76?selectedImageId=1241647001
So far this looks like a pretty standard pitchfork, and indeed it is - a little wider, tighter at the bottom, but the same general idea. You can go online and read a thousand sermons about the pitch fork and how it works here, by pastors far more qualified than me, so I am not going to talk about that at all.
The thing that captured my attention, and why I am adding this out-of-band article, is because I don't want to forget what the winnowing fork also does, or at least was recorded as doing in mid-to-late 20th century Palestine. In the Curator's comments for the aforementioned implement, there is a note that the winnowing fork is used in weddings and circumcisions, with citations of Weir, Palestinian Costume and K.Seger, Portrait of a Palestinian Village. The first is available in the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/palestiniancostu0000weir) and this gave me a chance to dig into this interesting afterthought.
During a Palestinian wedding, it was customary to dress the bride up and put her on a camel. Now, dressing up for a wedding is its own big thing, and I don't pretend to understand it - but these folks have it to a serious art. The woman sits in basically a big tent, such that it is basically impossible to see the bride at all. Some of these pictures are wild! But that is not the point of this. Like other cultures there is this idea of an evil eye, that someone might look upon the bride to curse her for one reason or another - and the bride is the highest point, the most likely target for that evil eye to alight. So the wedding party puts together what Weir calls a zarafe - in English she calls it a mock bride, a statue that travels on a preceding camel to catch the curse that might otherwise fall upon the bride. This statue is built upon a winnowing fork specifically - they stick a bale of hay on top, and then the rest kind of falls into place with the big tented dress. She has a lovely picture of a bride in Ramallah, West Bank riding in a car with a doll in a dress strapped to the top, which she attributes to the same idea in a more modern context, but that takes us away from the winnowing fork.
Circumcisions, which Weir says are the same kind of party but for children, have basically the same idea, and so that is how it ends up there as well - rather than seeing a circumcision party and cursing the child riding the subsequent camel, the bearer of the evil eye sees the mock bride and curses her, which of course it is just a farm tool so really who cares about that?
Anyway it is kind of neat to imagine John vaguely gesturing toward a passing bridal party, as he is talking about his place in the kingdom. Best man at the wedding - his job is not to be the groom or the bride, but to showcase their love. Here is Jesus, the groom - and soon is the church, the bride to come. But for now we have this scarecrow, this winnowing-fork in a false gown, collecting all the evil looks and mean glances before the bride appears, which Jesus is carrying around in preparation for his impending union.
Do I have any evidence that there were zarafes in weddings and circumcisions in the first century? No, not at all. When I looked Google had no idea there were zarafes that are not giraffes, and Gemini thought I was crazy to ask what that has to do with a wedding - and moreover, it thought for sure that the car picture was taken in New York by some man who took pictures of cars with bows, so apparently this is not widely-discussed phenomenon even today. Still it was a fun diversion for a Saturday, and it is an interesting twist on why, perhaps, John might suggest the pre-ministry Jesus was already running around with a winnowing fork.